Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Statin stupidity again

I found this while searching for a snippet from Radio 4's Today Program announcing the recommendation from field leaders in the USA that children should start taking stains at 8 years of age, on the off chance it might eliminate all illness for ever. Happy happy happy I don't think. Couldn't find it on R4, but it'll surface soon in other places I guess.

Sigh.

Peter

Edit: You've all read Chris's post here? Never mind which end of life, you have a statin deficiency.

I think you have to go back in time to eliminate the risk of C-section. Women can never give birth normally if the pelvis didn't grow properly, because of poor nutrition. If drugs have any benefit, they are probably from causing premature birth or low birth weight. The most telling line in the article was this:"Statins are already widely prescribed to cut the risk of heart disease.But they are not recommended for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, as there is concern of a possible link to birth defects."

They are trying to get everybody on statins, while ignoring what really causes heart diseases - junk carbs, junk fats, stress, inactivity, lack of sleep, lack of sunlight, etc. An elevated cholesterol level is just a marker of the damage being caused to the arteries and blood vessel by eating the typical modern diet and being a sedentary shut-in.

It is well known among farm-folk that animals that get too fat have a hard time giving birth. You can feel the extra fat in the birth canal of say, a horse. Of course the extra fat cushions the contractions.

”NEW AAP POLICY ON LIPID SCREENING AND HEART HEALTH IN CHILDRENThe American Academy of Pediatrics has issued new cholesterol screening and treatment recommendations for children. The policy statement, “Lipid Screening and Cardiovascular Health in Childhood,” recommends cholesterol screening of children and adolescents with a family history of high cholesterol or heart disease. It also recommends screening patients whose family history is unknown or those who have other factors for heart disease including obesity, high blood pressure or diabetes. Screening should take place after age two, but no later than age 10. The best method for testing is a fasting lipid profile. If a child has values within the normal range, testing should be repeated in three to five years. For children who are more than eight years old and who have high LDL concentrations, cholesterol-reducing medications should be considered. Younger patients with elevated cholesterol readings should focus on weight reduction and increased activity while receiving nutritional counseling. The statement also recommends the use of reduced-fat dairy products, such as two percent milk, for children as young as one year of age for whom overweight or obesity is a concern.”

For children over 8, notice there is no recommendation for lifestyle measures!

There are many issues of concern with consensus-based guidelines especially regarding the “treatment” of children with drugs with proven toxicity. As adults we can do our own research and refuse such madness, or decide the side effects are intolerable and throw them in the bin, but lawmakers and child protection services use these guidelines to enforce medication (it already happens in cancer, ADHD, ASD, HIV and obesity) or they forcibly remove the children. These guidelines are the “final word” uttered by experts – no science required, and are used in court to prove “parental abuse” in not giving said medication. This isn’t theoretical – it’s happening already. Children do not develop fatty streaks of any significance until age 19 – how does lowering cholesterol in 1999 prevent plaque formation in 2008? It is another tragedy in the making and speaks to the desperation of an industry manipulating puppet science to create new markets in the name of profits. The next move will be to arbitrarily lower the “normal” range for cholesterol in children as they have done several times in adults. Insert expletives here________.

My 1991 ABPI Data Sheet Compendium gives normal range total cholesterol as 2.8 – 7.8 mmol/L, and as you know the ULN is now only 5 mmol/L with no lower cut-off point. Looking at the 1998 levels of 80,000 people in a large metropolitan city almost nobody falls into the hypercholesterolaemia label under the old values, but with the new values 70% of the 45-70 year bracket do!The National Cholesterol Education Program's Expert Panel on Blood Cholesterol in Children and Adolescents give total cholesterol reference values in children (2-19 years) as < 170 mg/dl, which converts to 4.6 mmol/L. I couldn’t find the full report available, which annoys the tits off me as it was funded from the public purse, but found a non scientifically referenced précis of the report from American Family Physician stating the 75th percentile for TC in children is (the magic number!) 170 mg/dl. Put another way that’s 25% of ALL children who will be deemed in need of “treatment”.From an AAP 1998 statement: http://tinyurl.com/6kwa6o “Because no long-term studies of the relationship of blood cholesterol levels measured in childhood to coronary heart disease in later life have been conducted, the relationship of childhood cholesterol levels to the atherosclerotic process must be inferred from less direct evidence.”So “we don’t know what cholesterol level range is ‘normal’ for children, and we don’t know at what level it should be deemed “pathological” so we will arbitrarily define 25% of all children as being hypercholesterolaemic and in need of treatment with drugs (of questionable benefit and much evidence of harm) that have never been tested in healthy children based on a leap of faith that childhood cholesterol levels may in some unspecified way lead to CVD in later life.”My disgust and contempt for these pharma puppets is registering a 10 on the Richter scale – these people better keep away from me or I might have to do something grievous with Vaseline and an angle-poise lamp!

Hmm, put them on medication early, especially medication which hasn't been tested on children, and for which long-term effects have been problematic in adults. Fabulous idea. Get rid of traditional foods too, and feed them lots of low-fat dairy.

Argh!

The good news is, apparently there's been a lot of backlash from doctors (and everyone else)

"It is well known among farm-folk that animals that get too fat have a hard time giving birth."

This is true, but we must also take into account malnutrition. Women of today often have a poorly developed pelvis, due to lack of naturla fats and proteins while growing, and an abundance of grains, refined carbs, and PUFA vegetable oils. Such women are not going to give birth easily, no matter what they eat. Like if a person's jaw doesn't grow properly, they're going to have crowding and impaction and decay. Primitives did not have this problem, because they ate natural foods and spend most of their day standing. Folks today eat processed garbage and spend most of their day sitting down.

It seems to me pointless taking a statin (with many obvious and dangerous side effects) that achieves it's magic by actually increasing your vitamin D3 status (by some mechanism as yet unidentified) when you can more cheaply and more effectively and without any side effects achieve the same effect (by taking Cholecalciferol Vitamin D3.

It is sheer madness (or the perverted logic of big Pharma) to make people take a drug that has potential for unpleasant side effects that works by mimicking a safe supplement that is cheap and doesn't produce side effects at the normal amounts most people reading this require.

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!